Musk built a monopoly on space. Can China break it?
There is an argument being made that what Tesla did to boost the Chinese EV industry, SpaceX will do to boost China’s commercial space industry.
For instance, take what Ellis Scherer, the lead space analyst for ITIF (the world’s leading think tank for science and technology), recently said in this Reuters’ piece: “Everything SpaceX does is a bellwether for China’s space industry... I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a strong uptick in Chinese commercial-space listings and funding.”
And the facts, so far, seem to back this thesis up: many Chinese space startups received massive rounds of funding in recent months, or are on the way to IPO like SpaceX. Just a few examples:
LandSpace (蓝箭航天): Got its STAR Market IPO application accepted last December, seeking to raise 7.5 billion yuan (~$1B). It’s the first company accepted under a new regulatory framework in China that allows unprofitable rocket companies to list.
iSpace (星际荣耀): They closed a 5.04 billion yuan (~$700M) D++ round in February, shattering the record for the largest single funding round in Chinese commercial aerospace history. The company is developing the Hyperbola-3, a medium-sized reusable methane-oxygen rocket, with first orbital flight plus sea recovery planned for mid-2026.
CAS Space (中科宇航): Got its STAR Market IPO accepted in March, seeking 4.18 billion yuan (~$575M). Currently the only Chinese private rocket company to have launched foreign satellites.
Space Pioneer (天兵科技): They raised ~2.5 billion yuan (~$345M) across Pre-D and D rounds in October 2025. Its Tianlong-3 heavy-lift reusable rocket is in the final sprint before first flight.
GalaxySpace (银河航天): They closed a C round in the same week as iSpace’s record raise (early February 2026). They’re a satellite manufacturer building the satellites behind China’s “Satellite Internet” low-orbit constellation.
It’s a remarkably similar picture to the EV one: when the West had virtually only Tesla, China produced - at its height - more than a hundred EV companies. Now, where the West has SpaceX and (to a lesser extent) Blue Origin, China is fielding an entire fleet of rocket and satellite startups.
In fact, a strong argument can be made that the space industry is even more strategic, and potentially far more consequential, than the car industry. Stripped of Musk’s PR spin about saving humanity by colonizing Mars (something you need to be hopelessly naive to believe), what the SpaceX project is concretely about is:
Controlling the world's communication infrastructure via Starlink
Enabling the US security establishment to see and hear everything on Earth, all the time
Dominating access to space itself, from launch to orbital real estate
Each of these is very, very real.
Do the test one day and download the app “Stellarium” on your phone that allows you to identify stars, planets and… the satellites orbiting above you. I guarantee you that the sheer number of Starlink satellites right on top of your head at any given moment will genuinely shock you. There are currently over 10,000 of them up there - almost as many as there are planes in the sky at any given moment. Starlink satellites constitute roughly two-thirds of all active satellites orbiting Earth, all belonging to a single private American company. And they have existing approval and plans to quadruple that.
So it’s not conspiracy theories: it’s real, the SpaceX satellites are up there, right above your head, right now. Starlink already has over 12 million subscribers across 160 countries. Starshield - the military division of SpaceX - already has multi-billion dollar contracts with the US defense establishment to “enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe.” And SpaceX already controls the majority of global launch capacity. Every single one of my three points above is already well underway.
And, more worryingly, the roadmap for these satellites doesn't stop at surveillance: the US Congressional Research Service has documented plans for space-based directed energy weapons within the same SDA program that SpaceX Starshield is part of, with Congress having already granted the legal authority and budget to develop them.
So we're talking about a single private company, one deeply embedded in the US military-defense establishment, building the infrastructure to control global communications, conduct planetary surveillance, and potentially project military force from orbit. And that company already has more hardware up in space than every other country and company on Earth, combined.
From the standpoint of China, or that of any country that cares about sovereignty, letting that go unchallenged would be an act of strategic suicide.
The question, therefore, isn’t whether China should develop its own sovereign capacities to challenge SpaceX, but whether it can.
